Cakravartin Kingship: Between Theory and Practice in Medieval Sri Lanka

Talk by Bruno Shirley (Asian Studies, Cornell University)

In the twelfth century, the Buddhist monarchs of Poḷonnaruva began to claim to be cakravartins: literally "wheel turners," but usually translated as “universal kings.” Scholars have reasonably assumed that a direct line can be drawn backward from these cakravartin claims, and those ubiquitously made in later Buddhist polities across Southern Asia, to a supposed origin in Pali Canonical texts. I argue, however, that Poḷonnaruva’s s cakravartin claims represented a radical disjuncture in Pali Buddhist models of kingship. These claims were not modeled on canonical cakravartins, nor on historical monarchs like Aśoka; instead, they represented participation in what I call a transregional and trans-religious community of shared practice. It was only after and in response to these practices, I show, that scholars like Guruḷugōmin and Siddhattha Thero developed a theoretical framework for Buddhist cakravartinship, with implications for later developments in Southeast Asia.

Bruno M. Shirley is a Ph.D. candidate in Asian Literature, Religion, and Culture, Cornell University. His work focuses on Buddhist ideas about gender, politics, and devotion in the early second-millennium Indian Ocean, particularly in Sri Lanka.